The Foundation’s vision is to contribute towards a more just, equitable, humane and sustainable society. Its work is focussed on India.

Azim Premji set up the Foundation in 2001. Over the past years, he has irrevocably donated most of his wealth to fund the philanthropic work of the Foundation. As a part of the endowment created by these donations, along with other assets, 66% of the economic ownership of Wipro Ltd is with the Foundation.

Foundation ​‘on-the-ground’

The Foundation does extensive and deep ​‘on-the-ground’ work across the country – both directly through its own operations and through partners. The work spans education to other important areas of equity and human wellbeing.

Foundation’s Field Institutions

• The Foundation works on improving the equity and quality of the school education system in India, with a focus on the more disadvantaged areas of the country. The work ranges from teacher capacity development and leadership development to matters of policy and curriculum, including a significant contribution to the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and National Curriculum Framework 2023.
• The Foundation’s Field Institutions are spread across 7 states and 1 Union Territory which have over 3,50,000 schools. In addition, the Foundation also works deeply with 7 states in the northeast of the country and selectively in many other (currently 5) states. There are 59 institutions in the field working with these school systems. The Foundation also runs 9 schools for ​‘demonstration and training’.
• The Foundation’s own team of over 1700 people in the Field is spread across 263 locations. 
• The Field Institutions are in some of the most disadvantaged districts of India, each staffed with 10 – 60 members. The Foundation also runs 263 ​“Teacher Learning Centres”, in these districts.
• This deep institutional presence is now being leveraged by the Foundation to work on Health, Livelihoods, and a few other key initiatives (mentioned below), starting with a few regions and then expanding.

Partners:

The Foundation supports over 1000 other not-for-profit organisations (NPOs) across the country with multi-year grants and selectively with corpus grants. These NPOs do deep ​‘on-the-ground’ work across a range of issues — supporting people who are severely disadvantaged and marginalised with immediate care, access to essential services, and the possibility of a dignified future. Such support to partners is also growing rapidly.

• Some of these vulnerable groups are urban poor, persons with disability, women facing violence, adolescent girls at risk, children at risk, homeless, elderly poor, manual scavengers, migrant workers, farmers with marginal landholding, particularly vulnerable tribal groups and water-deficient communities.
• This work also involves collaboration with state governments and groups of NPOs to address issues systemically — beyond immediate care and support. Some such collaborations are: in Odisha, an effort to improve nutrition and hygiene; in Andhra Pradesh, improving the livelihood of small and marginal farmers; a multi-state programme to strengthen local governance and Panchayati Raj institutions; in Tamil Nadu, setting up centres in district hospitals to rescue, treat and rehabilitate mentally ill homeless individuals; supporting access to the judicial system for the vulnerable. 

Universities

The Foundation is building a network of its own universities to contribute to capacity development and research for the social sector.

• The first Azim Premji University was set up in Bengaluru in 2010 and today operates from a 110-acre campus. The second one, i.e., Azim Premji University, Bhopal, started in 2023 in a 50-acre campus. The work on the third campus in Ranchi has started on a 150-acre site, and this will be operational by 2026 and subsequently a fourth campus in the northeast part of India, is planned. 
• Azim Premji University has been offering degree programmes since 2011. Its mandate is to run teaching programmes and conduct research to contribute to the social sector in India, and to be an exemplar higher education institution – with inclusion and quality.
• The masters, diploma, and short duration programmes are focused on domains of human development; for example, Education, Livelihoods, Development, Governance and Policy, Public Health, and Sustainability. The undergraduate programmes offer a broad-based liberal education – integrating the fields of human development that are the focus of the University. 
• The research programmes are designed for direct contribution to matters of policy and practice, in these very fields of human development, for example, through dedicated research centres on Employment, Climate Change and Local Democracy (Panchayats).
• Capacity development of civil society and public system professionals is a key priority for the University. We offer a range of programmes in critical areas like early childhood education, inclusive education, disability, assessment, educational leadership, social sector leadership, and local democracy, reaching over 1 lakh practitioners annually. 
• The University produces a large collection of teaching-learning material for free public use. These include magazines in school subjects, development case studies, online textbooks, translations of higher education material, etc. 
• The Foundation’s on-the-ground operations and the University integrate real grassroots and systemic knowledge to contribute to policy, research and continuing education. 
• Twelve cohorts of over 4300 students from the programmes have graduated from the University and almost 100 percent of the students from the master’s programmes have received job offers on campus. Nearly 90 percent of these students have chosen to work in the social sector — many in grassroots field locations across the country.
• The Universities are entirely philanthropic; currently 89 percent of the expenditure is borne by the Foundation. Currently, about 60 percent of students are on scholarships offered by the University. The student body is very diverse, from across 29 states and varied socio-economic backgrounds.

Health 

While the Foundation contributes to a large range of domains and issues of human wellbeing as mentioned, over 20 years of direct work in School Education has built deep expertise in that domain and is now building Health as a similar domain of expertise and contribution. 

• The work in Health has started in Bengaluru and in the states of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. This work will strengthen the public health system — where required complementing and supplementing it — including running primary health clinics, secondary and tertiary hospitals.
• The Master of Public Health programme at the Bhopal campus is an initial step in contributing towards development of capacity in the Heath sector. At the Ranchi campus, a medical college with its associated 550-bed tertiary hospital will be set up. Plans include setting up two more such medical colleges and hospitals. 
• In addition to our own work in Health, the Foundation is collaborating with several partners – including hospitals and NGOs — to make healthcare accessible to vulnerable communities and to improve community health across a much larger geography. 

New initiatives

The Foundation is also in the initial phases of a few other significant initiatives, associated or adjacent to our work in Education and Health, which could contribute deeply to human wellbeing. Some of the key initiatives are:

• Strengthening the nutritional content of mid-day meals for children in government schools and Anganwadis by providing an egg (or its substitute) every day to every child. This project, first implemented in Karnataka, is benefitting over 55 lakh children, will be rolled out across multiple states over the next 2 years. 
• Setting up and running creches in rural areas for infants and children under the age of 3 in some of the remotest geographies. 1100 creches are operational in Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Karnataka and Odisha, where over 16,000 children are enrolled.
• Scholarships for support of higher education of girls across India—starting with 30,000 scholarships in 2024 and going up to 2,50,000 scholarships in the academic year 2025 – 26.
• A national Youth Programme to support development of young people to do constructive social work, manifesting the values of our Constitution. Currently the programme has about 1.25 lakh young people in about 3000 youth groups.
• In a few geographies, intense work has been started to improve significantly the livelihoods of those in poverty. The challenge is to help foster local economic development in these ​‘livelihood regions’, such that there is a substantial increase in overall value in the local economy, thus enabling significant increase in household level incomes — equitably, with ecological sensitivity, and responding to the aspirations of local youth populations. Our own operations have been initiated on this in a few blocks in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, which will expand, and the initiative will expand to other regions in collaboration with our partners.